If you were counting down to "Gangnam Style"'s one billionth YouTube view on the site BillionCount.com, you might have been a little confused at what happened when the counter hit 1,000,000,000: it turned into a porn site: the "Xpress Cougar Dating Club." "When it was getting closer to 1 billion views I figured I had to do something with it," the site's creator told us.

BillionCount.com, a site set up solely to provide an approximate countdown to the exact moment at which "Gangnam Style" would hit one billion views, had been shared several thousand times on Facebook and Twitter by 10:26 a.m. — the moment when it estimated that the video had surpassed a billion. It now redirects to the self-proclaimed "#1 Sex Dating Site" on the internet, as many people noticed:

The website tracking when Gangnam Style would hit a billion views automatically turned to porn ads when it happened. Well played, Internet.

The site is registered to a Eugene Hartley of Los Angeles. I emailed him to see what the story was. "To be honest it was just a serious project in the beginning, and at the end I wanted to promote Bitcoin [the independent digital currency] through it," he wrote back. "[I] couldn't find a real good way to do so. When it was getting closer to 1 billion views I figured I had to do something with it but wasn't really sure what." So he made a choice that webmasters have been making since time immemorial: "It was either let the site die off, or try to get some money through promoting dating sites."

And what better way to close out the year in the internet, really? A failed attempt at attaching a bitcoin promotion to the year's biggest viral video, now just a bunch of "adult dating site" ads.